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arXiv:2208.00450 · SciPost Physics

Parameter-parallel distributed variational quantum algorithm

Yun-Fei Niu, Shuo Zhang, Chen Ding, Wan‐Su Bao, He-Liang Huang

Published May 26, 2023• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have emerged as a promising near-term technique to explore practical quantum advantage on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. However, the inefficient parameter training process due to the incompatibility with backpropagation and the cost of a large number of measurements, posing a great challenge to the large-scale development of VQAs. Here, we propose a parameter-parallel distributed variational quantum algorithm (PPD-VQA), to accelerate the training process by parameter-parallel training with multiple quantum processors. To maintain the high performance of PPD-VQA in the realistic noise scenarios, a alternate training strategy is proposed to alleviate the acceleration attenuation caused by noise differences among multiple quantum processors, which is an unavoidable common problem of distributed VQA. Besides, the gradient compression is also employed to overcome the potential communication bottlenecks. The achieved results suggest that the PPD-VQA could provide a practical solution for coordinating multiple quantum processors to handle large-scale real-word applications.

DOI
10.21468/scipostphys.14.5.132

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Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have emerged as a promising near-term technique to explore practical quantum advantage on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. However, the inefficient parameter training process due to the incompatibility with backpropagation and the cost of a large number of measurements, posing a great challenge to the large-scale development of VQAs. Here, we propose a parameter-parallel distributed variational quantum algorithm (PPD-VQA), to accelerate the training process by parameter-parallel training with multiple quantum processors. To maintain the high performance of PPD-VQA in the realistic noise scenarios, a alternate training strategy is proposed to alleviate the acceleration attenuation caused by noise differences among multiple quantum processors, which is an unavoidable common problem of distributed VQA. Besides, the gradient compression is also employed to overcome the potential communication bottlenecks. The achieved results suggest that the PPD-VQA could provide a practical solution for coordinating multiple quantum processors to handle large-scale real-word applications.
Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) have the potential of utilizing near-term quantum machines to gain certain computational advantages over classical methods. Nevertheless, modern VQAs suffer from cumbersome computational overhead, hampered by the tradition of employing a solitary quantum processor to handle large-volume data. As such, to better exert the superiority of VQAs, it is of great significance to improve their runtime efficiency. Here we devise an efficient distributed optimization scheme, called QUDIO, to address this issue. Specifically, in QUDIO, a classical central server partitions the learning problem into multiple subproblems and allocate them to multiple local nodes where each of them consists of a quantum processor and a classical optimizer. During the training procedure, all local nodes proceed parallel optimization and the classical server synchronizes optimization information among local nodes timely. In doing so, we prove a sublinear convergence rate of QUDIO in terms of the number of global iteration under the ideal scenario, while the system imperfection may incur divergent optimization. Numerical results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that QUDIO can surprisingly achieve a superlinear runtime speedup with respect to the number of local nodes. Our proposal can be readily mixed with other advanced VQAs-based techniques to narrow the gap between the state of the art and applications with quantum advantage.
We introduce a general framework called neural-network- (NN) encoded variational quantum algorithms (VQAs), or NNVQA for short, to address the challenges of implementing VQAs on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers. Specifically, NNVQA feeds input (such as parameters of a Hamiltonian) from a given problem to a neural network and uses its outputs to parameterize an ansatz circuit for the standard VQA. Combining the strengths of NN and parameterized quantum circuits, NNVQA can accelerate the training process of VQAs and handle a broad family of related problems with varying input parameters with the pretrained NN. To concretely illustrate the merits of NNVQA, we present results on a NN variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) for solving the ground state of parameterized XXZXXZXXZ spin models in one and two dimensions. Our results demonstrate that NNVQE is able to estimate the ground-state energies of parameterized Hamiltonians with high precision without fine tuning, and significantly reduce the overall training cost to estimate ground-state properties across the phases of the given Hamiltonian. We also employ an active learning strategy to further increase the training efficiency while maintaining prediction accuracy. These encouraging results demonstrate that NNVQAs offer an alternative hybrid quantum-classical paradigm to utilize NISQ resources for solving more realistic and challenging computational problems.
Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are leading strategies to reach practical utilities of near-term quantum devices. However, the no-cloning theorem in quantum mechanics precludes standard backpropagation, leading to prohibitive quantum resource costs when applying VQAs to large-scale tasks. To address this challenge, we reformulate the training dynamics of VQAs as a nonlinear partial differential equation and propose a novel protocol that leverages physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to model this dynamical system efficiently. Given a small amount of training trajectory data collected from quantum devices, our protocol predicts the parameter updates of VQAs over multiple iterations on the classical side, dramatically reducing quantum resource costs. Through systematic numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our method achieves up to a 30x speedup compared to conventional methods and reduces quantum resource costs by as much as 90\% for tasks involving up to 40 qubits, including ground state preparation of different quantum systems, while maintaining competitive accuracy. Our approach complements existing techniques aimed at improving the efficiency of VQAs and further strengthens their potential for practical applications.
Variational quantum algorithms have promising applications in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. These algorithms rely on a classical optimization outer loop that minimizes a parameterized quantum circuit function. The optimization in variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) is NP-hard, meaning that finding the optimal solution is infeasible in the worst-case scenario. One way to address this challenge is through parallel optimization of parameters using multiple-parameterized quantum circuits. However, this approach is unsuitable for cloud-based quantum processing unit utilization due to the increased number of quantum circuit executions. Although NISQ devices have limitations in terms of gate depth, their size has been growing in recent years. Therefore, implementing multiple-parameterized quantum circuits in NISQ devices can suppress the increase in the number of executions. In this study, we propose a parallel-VQE, which leverages the parallel execution of parameterized quantum circuits to perform parallel parameter optimization in VQE, achieving convergence to solutions closer to the ground state. We validate the effectiveness of parallel-VQE in solving the random weighted max-cut problem using numerical simulations and a real quantum device. We present the results of running up to six circuits in parallel (120 qubits) and demonstrate the advantages of using multiple units to improve computational accuracy. This study provides a potential method for solving eigenvalue problems and combinatorial optimization problems for future quantum devices.
Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) provide a promising approach to achieve quantum advantage in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era. In this era, quantum computers experience high error rates and quantum error detection and correction is not feasible. VQAs can utilize noisy qubits in tandem with classical optimization algorithms to solve hard problems. However, VQAs are still slow relative to their classical counterparts. Hence, improving the performance of VQAs will be necessary to make them competitive. While VQAs are expected perform better as the problem sizes increase, increasing their performance will make them a viable option sooner. In this work we show that circuit-level concurrency provides a means to increase the performance of variational quantum algorithms on noisy quantum computers. This involves mapping multiple instances of the same circuit (program) onto the quantum computer at the same time, which allows multiple samples in a variational quantum algorithm to be gathered in parallel for each training iteration. We demonstrate that this technique provides a linear increase in training speed when increasing the number of concurrently running quantum circuits. Furthermore, even with pessimistic error rates concurrent quantum circuit sampling can speed up the quantum approximate optimization algorithm by up to 20x with low mapping and run time overhead.
Applying low-depth quantum neural networks (QNNs), variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are both promising and challenging in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era: Despite its remarkable progress, criticisms on the efficiency and feasibility issues never stopped. However, whether VQAs can demonstrate quantum advantages is still undetermined till now, which will be investigated in this paper. First, we will prove that there exists a dependency between the parameter number and the gradient-evaluation cost when training QNNs. Noticing there is no such direct dependency when training classical neural networks with the backpropagation algorithm, we argue that such a dependency limits the scalability of VQAs. Second, we estimate the time for running VQAs in ideal cases, i.e., without considering realistic limitations like noise and reachability. We will show that the ideal time cost easily reaches the order of a 1-year wall time. Third, by comparing with the time cost using classical simulation of quantum circuits, we will show that VQAs can only outperform the classical simulation case when the time cost reaches the scaling of 10010^0100-10210^2102 years. Finally, based on the above results, we argue that it would be difficult for VQAs to outperform classical cases in view of time scaling, and therefore, demonstrate quantum advantages, with the current workflow. Since VQAs as well as quantum computing are developing rapidly, this work does not aim to deny the potential of VQAs. The analysis in this paper provides directions for optimizing VQAs, and in the long run, seeking more natural hybrid quantum-classical algorithms would be meaningful.